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Cancer Claims 'Gilligan's Island' Star

Posted on: Wednesday, 7 September 2005, 12:00 CDT

Bob Denver, whose portrayal of goofy castaway Gilligan on the 1960s TV show "Gilligan's Island," made him an iconic figure to generations of TV viewers, has died. He was 70.

Denver died Friday at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in North Carolina of complications from treatment he was receiving for cancer, his agent, Mike Eisenstadt, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Denver, who for the past several years had lived in Princeton, W.Va., also underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery this year.

His wife, Dreama, and children Patrick, Megan, Emily and Colin were with him.

"He was my everything and I will love him forever," Dreama Denver said in a statement.

Denver's signature role was Gilligan, but when he took the role in 1964 he was already widely known to TV audiences for another iconic character, Maynard G. Krebs, the bearded beatnik friend of Dwayne Hickman's Dobie in the "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," which aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963.

Gilligan was industrious but inept. And his character was as lovable as he was inept. Viewers embraced the skinny kid in the white sailor hat.

So did the skipper, who was played by Alan Hale Jr. and who always referred to his first mate affectionately as "little buddy."

State Sen. Sheila James Kuehl, D-Los Angeles, who played Dobie's love-struck pursuer, remembered Denver as a mentor, both in acting and life.

"What he taught me about acting was when you work to make the other person look good, you end up looking good yourself," she said. "What he taught me about life was that you could love your work, but it was really more important to love your friends and family."

"As silly as it seems to all of us, it has made a difference in a lot of children's lives," Dawn Wells, who played castaway Mary Ann Summers, once said. "Gilligan is a buffoon that makes mistakes and I cannot tell you how many kids come up and say, 'But you loved him anyway.' "

TV critics were less kind, dismissing the show about a group of tourists being stranded on an uncharted desert island as inane. But after it was canceled by CBS in 1967, it found new audiences over and over in syndicated reruns and reunion films.

After "Gilligan's Island," Denver went on to star in other TV series, including "The Good Guys" and "Dusty's Trail," as well as to make numerous appearances in films and TV shows.

"It was the mid-'70s when I realized it wasn't going off the air," Denver told The Associated Press in 2001, noting then that he enjoyed checking the Web site eBay each day to keep up on the prices "Gilligan" memorabilia were fetching.

"I certainly didn't set out to have a series rerun forever, but it's not a bad experience at all," he added.

Source: Daily Breeze

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